How Do Auditors Behave During Periods of Market Euphoria? The Case of Internet IPOs*
研究了互联网泡沫期间审计师对承压互联网IPO公司出具持续经营意见的行为，发现1999年1月至2000年4月间意见数量激增，但五大会计师事务所出具此类意见的可能性降低，且意见与客户财务困境、公司年龄、风险资本支持、IPO现金消耗及审计师独立性相关，对投资者预警价值下降。
How do auditors behave during periods of market euphoria? To address this question, we study auditor going-concern opinions around the time of the wave of stressed Internet companies filing to go public on Nasdaq, a period many characterize as the ‘dot com bubble’. We focus on the day the auditor signs the opinion that appears in a stressed, Internet registrants’ IPO filing and document a sharp increase in the number of opinions with dates between January 1999 and April 2000. Contemporaneous with this jump in transaction volume, and for the duration of these 16-months, Big 5 firms were less likely to render going-concern opinions to their stressed, Internet IPO registrant clients. Upon conducting tests for determinants that could lead auditors to shift their decision criteria during this euphoric audit market, we find the presence of a going-concern opinion varies with variables that proxy for client reasons (financial distress, company age, venture backing, IPO cash burn) and for less auditor independence/skepticism (recent fees for clients without venture backing and a rush-to-market for clients with venture backing) by the Big 5 firms. These findings suggest a mixed conclusion regarding the Big 5's behavior; as the presence of a going-concern opinion varies inversely with variables that proxy for both client viability and auditor self interest. As for consequences to investors, our analysis of two, three and four-year post-IPO stock delisting provides some evidence of a decrease in the predictive content (early-warning value) of Big 5 opinions signed during the Internet IPO bubble.